The Lament Configuration
by Callum J. Stewart
Summary: When Sherlock Holmes solves the riddle of the Lament Configuration he summons from the very bowels of Hell the Cenobites who are unwilling to leave 221B Baker Street empty handed... Part of the ongoing series "The Unopened Casebook of Sherlock Holmes."


**THE UNOPENED CASEBOOK OF SHERLOCK HOLMES:**

**The Lament Configuration**

Being a reprint from the memoirs of John H. Watson, M.D., 

late of the army medical department

Edited by Callum J. Stewart

I had never really asked Holmes about the adventures he undertook during what has become known as "the great hiatus." I know he travelled in the East and spent time with the high llama of Tibet, but the exact details of these incidents remain unknown to me. I do know that at some point during his travels throughout the East, he came into possession of a puzzle box. A seemingly innocuous cube of black lacquer, it appeared to be Chinese in origin and was of unparalleled workmanship. The box, constructed by Philip Lemarchand, the famous maker of mechanical birds, at the behest of the Duc de I'Isle, Holmes said, was called the Lament Configuration, and, according to the Chinese trader who sold it to my friend, whoever solved the puzzle and opened the box would be rewarded with untold wealth, fame and other worldly delights. Holmes, of course, put no stock in such legends and viewed the Lament Configuration merely as an intellectual puzzle and I, for my part, encouraged him to try to solve it when we were not engaged on a case. Attempting to solve the riddle of Lemarchand's box kept his mind active and his hands away from the needle he so often turned to when he was not working.

It was 1894, and Holmes and I had just come off the case you might know as "The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge." Despite Murillo and his companions giving the police the slip, news had reached us that shortly after arriving in Madrid, they had been murdered by Nihilists. Holmes and I, of course, knew better and, if truth be told, I could not have hoped for a more fitting fate to befall the men. We would not be presented with another case for some time, and I feared Holmes would fall into his usual routine of injecting his seven per-cent solution to stave off the, to him at least, mind numbing normality of everyday life, but, to my surprise and delight, he turned not to the needle but to the Lament Configuration.

"I will solve the puzzle of Lemarchand's Box, Watson" he announced one morning over breakfast, "and I will solve it today." Holmes bounded across the room and produced the box from his drawer. He leapt into his chair and, pausing only to light his pipe, began running his long fingers over the box, probing every crevice, every nook, every cranny of its six sides, a look of grim and intense determination on his face.

"Well," said I, putting down my cutlery and rising, "I am off to get today's paper. Are you in need of anything?" Holmes did not respond. I called his name and by way of response he merely grunted and waved his hand towards the door.

When I returned almost half an hour later I was greeted at the door to our sitting room by so much thick blue smoke that the room seemed to be on fire. In the middle of the room sat Holmes, his pipe puffing out acrid smoke and his hands still manipulating the puzzle box. I waded through the room, the air as thick as any of London's infamous pea-soupers, and opened a window. As the room cleared I heard for the first time a simple melodic line that emerged from the box; a short rondo of sublime banality. Standing behind Holmes, I could see that he had worked loose the first piece of the puzzle.

"Bravo, Holmes" said I. "You're finally making some progress with that thing!"

No sooner had the words left my mouth when Holmes' fingers unlocked some unseen mechanism and the second piece of the puzzle slid into place. The victory was rewarded with a further filigree added to the tune, which had become quite lodged in my head so ingratiating was the melody. Holmes was silent and a fine film of sweat began to form on his forehead and upper lip as his fingers continued to probe the surface of the Lament Configuration. I smiled at my friend's single minded determination and was silently thankful he had something other than cocaine to occupy his mind. I relaxed into my chair opposite him and began to read the newspapers I had bought. Over the course of the next hour every so often I would hear the click of another piece sliding into place and the melody from within the box would again be embellished by another refrain. When I had finished reading through the papers, I rose and crossed the room to look out of the window. Baker Street was its usual busy self as the people below went about their daily affairs and I decided I would take a walk among them. I, of course, invited Holmes along, but so engrossed was he in his quest to solve Lemarchand's Box that I doubt very much that he heard me or even noticed I had left.

I returned to Baker Street a little before noon and found Holmes in the same position I had left him - cross legged in his chair, tinkering with his new pet project. Mrs. Hudson had evidently endeavoured to entice Holmes to eat, but her efforts, like so often in the past, had failed and were rapidly cooling, untouched, upon the table. The melody that emanated from the box had by now reached almost symphonic proportions, and Holmes' pipe was belching smoke into the room like a steam engine. I peered over my friend's shoulder and observed that his work was almost complete for the box was almost entirely disassembled. As Holmes manipulated a tiny hidden switch and another piece slid loose Big Ben began chiming the hour. When the bell tolled twelve times, however, an event of extraordinary singularity took place. The chimes kept ringing out, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and so on. The most bizarre aspect of this did not become clear to me until I looked out of the window and, expecting to see the men checking their watches and the women gossiping amongst themselves about what was occurring, I was greeted with a scene of utter normality. It seemed that the mournful tolling of the great bell could only be heard in our little room.

As I checked the clock on the mantle and also the clock in the hall and found them both silent save for the workings of their internal mechanisms, Holmes cried out to me. I rushed back into the sitting room and saw Holmes rooted to the spot, seemingly paralysed and in his eyes a look of sheer terror. Rendered speechless by absolute and complete horror, Holmes held up his hand, a finger pointing at the wall behind me. Lying on the seat behind him was the now fully deconstructed Lament Configuration. I turned and was greeted by a sight that will remain with me until my dying day. My readers will know that, despite Holmes' frequent claims to the contrary, I keep hyperbole and exaggeration out of my accounts of my adventures with Holmes, so you can believe me when I tell you that what faced me upon that wall was a sight more hellish that human eyes have never seen. The entire fabric of reality seemed to be torn apart and in the middle of the wall was a massive gaping hole from which blasts of searing hot fire burst like volcanic eruptions. Swirling smoke belched from the hole and filled the room while such a stench as I have never encountered hung in the air. Half visible in the depths of that awful nothingness were writhing figures, their faces twisted in singular expressions that somehow conveyed both intense pain and ecstatic pleasure. Worse than the dreadful images though, were the noises: the squeal of unoiled winches, the rasp of hooks and razors being sharpened, and most terrible of all, the screaming of tormented souls. I backed across the room and stood alongside Holmes who, despite once me that the human brain is capable of only one strong emotion at a time and if it is filled with curiosity or scientific enthusiasm then there is no room for fear, stood in silent and mortal terror.

And then, from the very depths of Hell itself, THEY appeared.

They entered the room from the hole in the wall and stood before us. Never, never in the delirious dreams of a disordered brain could anything more appalling, more hellish be conceived than the four figures who faced us. All were repulsive in appearance and all were clad similarly in black leather, but to fail to describe them individually would be to fail to convey the true horror that Holmes and I beheld. The first, an obscenely corpulent man wearing dark glasses, his ears cut off and long, oozing wounds framing his face, stood smiling grotesquely; the second, a female, tall, bald and possessed of an unearthly elegance and androgynous beauty that only made the wound on her throat and the wire contraption that held it perpetually open and bleeding all the more repulsive; the third was the least human looking of the quartet with a loathsome horselike head and lips pulled back into an eternal rictus by a series of hooks and wires to show its continually chattering teeth. The aura of all pervading evil which accompanied these three devils paled in comparison, however, to the fourth. A more hellish figure you could not possibly imagine; indeed, even now, thinking back it all seems like a fevered dream, and yet there he stood like the Black Pope of Hell, his dead eyes boring a hole into my soul. He was clad, like his companions, in black leather and upon his head and face there was a grid of deep scars. The most repulsive feature however was not this network of wounds, but the fact that at each intersection of the grid a long nail had been driven into the skull itself. He regarded Holmes and I with arrogant contempt and there was a long pregnant pause before, somehow, Holmes summoned the courage to speak.

"Who are you?" said he, his voice strong and giving no clue to his true state of abject terror.

The leader of the four - the one with the nails driven into his skull - spoke. "We are the Cenobites," he said, his voice cold and emotionless. "Explorers in the further regions of experience. Demons to some; angels to others."

"Where have you come from?" Holmes demanded.

"The box" averred the lead Cenobite. "You opened it. We came."

"The box? It is merely a puzzle box; a child's toy."

"It is a means to summon us. You opened it. We came. And we cannot return...alone."

These last words filled me with dread terror, but more than that, it filled me with an overwhelming desire to act. Holmes had saved my life on occasions almost innumerable, and the time had come to repay my debt. Leaping into action I all but threw myself across the room and seized my old Webley but before I could turn it on the Cenobites a sextet of chains attached to wicked hooks flew from the portal to Hell in the wall and sunk deep into the flesh of my face and neck. The chains then pulled taut so that if I made even the slightest move the flesh would be torn from my bones.

"If he takes another step, we open his throat." It was the female creature who spoke now, her voice as androgynous as her appearance. The leader turned to Holmes who looked at me helplessly.

"Time to go. We will release your friend after we leave."

Holmes took a step toward me but the suddenly booming voice of the lead Cenobite and the sight of the hooks tightening and tugging at my flesh stopped him in his tracks. Holmes turned back to the Cenobites, a helpless look in his eyes. He nodded almost imperceptibly to them and the hooks disengaged from my skin and flew back into that unholy pit.

"Holmes, no," I began but Holmes silenced me with a wave of his hand.

"Come now" the fat Cenobite said. "We have such sights to show you."

Holmes turned his back to the creatures and walked to his chair. "May I, at the very least, take my pipe?" he asked, still showing his back to the ungodly group.

"You may. Though it will be of little use to you" the leader of the Cenobites said, his tone mocking.

Holmes bent over his chair to pick up his pipe and, lifting it from the seat, he stood up. I was confused, for I could see Holmes' favourite pipe, the long stemmed one he loved so much, lying on the mantle. Holmes' arms seemed to be working franticly at something and by the time Cenobites realised what he was doing it was too late. Holmes spun round almost theatrically and held up the reconstructed Lament Configuration.

The Cenobites howled in anguish, an unearthly sound that was a mixture of agony and rage and that I fear will ring in my ears for all eternity as their images began to flicker and spiral away into ether. The entire room began to spin as they were drawn inexorably back into the pit of Hell from whence they came. First went the disgusting fat creature, his body being sucked through the hole in the wall, then went the woman followed by the chatterer, all three screaming and cursing Holmes' name. Finally, the leader followed them into the portal as it began to close. He clutched the sides of the hole and shouted a parting word to Holmes.

"You have won this time but we will return! Trick us again and your suffering will be legendary, even in Hell!"

And with that he was gone; the room returned to normal; it was over.

I rushed across the room to be at my friend's side. Holmes collapsed into his chair, sweating profusely and breathing heavily. He had come face to face with death before - at Reichenbach, on Dartmoor, in 13 Miller's Court - but never had he come so close to the very gates of Hell. The puncture wounds on my face and neck healed at the very moment the portal closed and so I tended to Holmes' needs without giving thought to my own. When Holmes had recovered enough to talk I asked him how he knew reassembling the box would send the demonic Cenobites back to whatever accursed realm they had come from.

"I didn't" Holmes said softly.

"You didn't!" I ejaculated. "But what if you had been mistaken!?"

"Then I would have had no recourse but to acquiesce with the Cenobites' wishes and accompany them into the portal."

"Then thank God you were right!"

"God had nothing to do with it, Watson. If disassembling to box brought forth those abominations, then logic suggests that re-assembling it would cast them back. I admit though, that logic, as we have seen in the past, is not one hundred per-cent infallible, but it was a risk I had to take."

As I placed my handkerchief on Holmes' brow to mop up some of the sweat which had formed there a thought occurred to me. "You've been tinkering with that infernal box for years, Holmes. How did you manage to reassemble it so rapidly?"

"The brain, Watson! The brain - my brain - is like a sponge. I absorb knowledge; try as I might I cannot forget that which I have learned. You will recall the very first day we met you explained Copernican theory to me. Despite my very best efforts to forget so useless a piece of trivia, Nicolaus Copernicus' teachings about the movements of the heavens have remained lodged in my head since that fateful day we met at St. Bartholomew's. As I was deconstructing the box today I could not do help but keep a mental record of every piece's positioning and the exact movement of my hands that brought about that piece's removal. It was merely a matter of reversing the process. I admit it took longer that I would have liked, but the result is what matters."

"Indeed!" said I, astounded that Holmes, despite his abject terror, had been able to formulate a plan and act upon it, wagering his eternal soul on its success. This gamble, this daring gambit, this life-or-death act of bravery will, sadly, at Holmes' behest never be reported. The world will never know what happened that day at 221B Baker Street and will never know how an all-or-nothing attempt venture towards survival not only saved not only the life and immortal soul of him whom I shall ever regard as the best and wisest man whom I have ever known, but also sent the unholy Cenobites back to Hell where they belong.

It is with a heavy heart, therefore, that I consign this manuscript to the file that constitutes the Unopened Casebook of Sherlock Holmes.


End file.
